Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Whatever makes you sleep well at night

It’s
Not Obama’s Fault “The inconvenient truths about why you can’t blame the West
for what's happened in Syria.” The argument made here by Aaron David
Miller would have been believable had the United States not had a long history
of interventions, many of which justified on humanitarian lines, and the last
of which, in Libya, came exactly as the nonviolent protest movement erupted in
Syria. Indeed, in Libya, the administration chose to intervene on the side of an armed
insurrection, while it turned a blind eye to the cause of the nonviolent
protesters in Syria, even they dominated the scene for close to a year, before
the pressures of militarization took over and the country descended into civil
war.

So, when Syrian activists looked to
the United States in particular for leadership, this tendency did not come out
of nowhere, it was not born in a vacuum,
rather, it stemmed from well-established facts and trends in America’s
own history, including its own recent actions. The Bush administration’s
intervention in Iraq justified on the basis of democracy promotion, and its
support of the Freedom Agenda, which included providing funds for training
thousands of nonviolent activists in Syria and across the region played an
important role here. So did the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya,
support for change in Tunisia and Egypt, and its own stances on the crisis in Syria
itself, from President Obama’s early praise of nonviolent protest leaders, to
his call for Assad’s departure, to his infamous red line.

Beyond the United States, the
development and adoption by dozens of states as well as the UN of the legal
doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect, whose applicability to the Syrian
situation was all too evident since the early days of the Syrian Revolution, played
a crucial role in building up expectations as well. Obama himself was known to
have been a supporter of the application of this doctrine in Darfur, and he had
invoked it in regard to Libya. Having Susan Rice and Samantha Powers on his
national security team, two one-time vehement advocate of this doctrine loomed
as a good sing in this regard. If there were an aura of inevitability to the
situation in Syria devolving into a civil war, there was an even stronger aura
of inevitability in regard to America’s intervention in Syria.

The prospect that Syria would be
allowed to devolve into this quagmire flew in the face of a well-established
legal, humanitarian and political trends championed by liberals like Obama,
endorsed by promises from a variety of politicians, Left and Right, and sealed
with legal doctrines that ended up acquiring UN support. As such, Obama’s
decision on noninvolvement in Syria came out of nowhere and cannot be justified
in this callous manner.

Trying to pass the hot potato to
the Arabs comes by way of deflecting blame. Authoritarian Arab regimes had no
reason to rush to the defense of nonviolent prodemocracy protesters, but,
giving America’s dithering, they had enough time to do what they do best: help
Assad turn the nonviolent movement into an armed insurrection, then, Islamize
it. Moreover, when Western Europe itself proved time and again that, without
American leadership, she is incapable of mustering the will necessary to stop
conflicts even when they occur on its own turf, as was the case in Bosnia and
Kosovo, trying to lay the blame on an impotent entity like the Arab League make
absolutely no sense. In fact, this is what “infantilizing” our situation
actually looks like. There is an Arab identity out there, but it has repeatedly
proven too weak to allow for the adoption of concerted efforts on any crisis.
The reality is Saudis, Egyptians, Moroccans, Syrians etc. are different peoples
with different, sometimes, radically different, customs and interests and
outlooks to be lumped together under one epithet. Outside scholars have known
that and asserted it for decades. As such, it’s simply too facetious to invoke
Arabism at this stage.

To put it differently: watching
someone drown when you are a good swimmer and in possession of a boat, life
vests and a rope, yet choosing to do nothing is actually illegal in many
countries, and not just immoral. Justifying your inaction by claiming that you
were afraid of some hypothetical sharks in the water, or by claiming that it
was the responsibility of other people to intervene, people whom you well know
are bad swimmers and can barely keep their heads above water should they go in,
does not help your case.

As for America, people look up to
her, because she willingly (and actively, at least since WWII) sought to be in
that position, by virtue of its values and interests. Syria was never a test
that Obama “couldn’t possibly have passed,” it was a test that he chose to
ignore. And no, Obama was not expected to do everything alone, but he was
expected to lead the way, as behooves an American leader. There have been
numerous occasions where an American intervention could have made ample
difference and prevented this mass slaughter.

Even now there are a variety of
ways where an American intervention can create a more suitable environment for
holding serious peace talks by establishing a better balance of forces on the
ground. But Obama has amply proven by now that he is not the kind of guy who
can be counted on to do the decent thing. Realists reserve their decency to the
home front, because the ideal of creating a better world is not realistic, nor
is it the responsibility of the powerful. This is what idealists may contend
and want, but it’s not what realism is about.

So, Aaron, you are quite wrong: America
does squarely belong on the list of countries to blame for what’s happening today
in Syria, and across the region. It belongs there by virtue of its own history,
its own values, its own power, and the actions and stated positions of its
recent leaders, including many of those adopted by President Obama himself.

The realists might want to deny
all this, falling back on that old amoral behavior, that never disappeared
anyway, because it makes the job of leadership much easier and, perhaps, much
more popularly justifiable, considering its low material costs on the short-run.
But that does not make their choice right, neither strategically or morally, and
will not make its long-term costs disappear. When concentration camps
are back in vogue again, there is something fundamentally wrong at works,
and the most powerful nation on earth, as its leaders keep boasting, cannot
afford to look the other way or wring its hands.

Go ahead, patronize me!

About Ammar

Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian-American author and pro-democracy activist based in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is the founder of the Tharwa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to democracy promotion. His personal website and entries from his older blogs can be accessed here.

The Delirica

The Delirica is a companion blog to the Daily Digest of Global Delirium meant to highlight certain DDGD items by publishing them as separate posts. Also, the Delirica republishes articles by Ammar that appeared on other sites since 2016. Older articles can be found on Ammar's internet archive: Ammar.World